Top 3 feature enhancements of Windows 10 Creators Update

Yesterday I received an update of the Windows Insiders Program which contains some great improvements which I’d to share with you. Hereby some highlights.

Mobile application management

With the Creators Update we’re introducing mobile application management, a new feature that will protect data on personal devices without requiring the device to be enrolled in a Mobile Device Management solution. As employees use their own devices at work more and more, we are providing IT with oversight to apply policies to the applications employees use to be productive. This helps keep corporate data more secure without taking on the added responsibility of managing employees’ personal devices.

Continued improvements for Windows as a service

Finally, our enterprise customers have told us they want to better manage the size of downloads. Soon we’ll enable differential downloads for both mobile and PC devices. This means updates after the Creators Update will only include the changes that have been made since the last update, decreasing the download size by approximately 35%. We’re also working to improve System Center Configuration Manager express updates to help reduce the monthly update size by up to 90%.

In the Creators Update we’re also adding new actions and insights in Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) to investigate and respond to network attacks, including sensors in memory, enriched intelligence and new remediation actions.

In-place UEFI conversion

We’ve heard from our customers that they want to take advantage of new Windows 10 security investments like Device Guard on their existing modern hardware, but many of these new features require UEFI-enabled devices. For those customers who have already provisioned modern Windows PCs that support UEFI but installed Windows 7 using legacy BIOS, converting a device to UEFI required an IT manager to repartition the disc and reconfigure the firmware. This meant they would need to physically touch each device in their enterprise. With the Creators Update, we will introduce a simple conversion tool that automates this previously manual work. This conversion tool can be integrated with management tools such as System Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr)* as part of the Windows 7 to Windows 10 in-place upgrade process.